Team WAVE the all-women crew on combined their talents and braved the elements for a greater cause than just winning the 100th Anniversary of the Newport to Bermuda Race.

The seven crewmembers are members of Women Against Violence Everywhere ? or WAVE.

It is also the first time in the history of the race that an all women crew earned a division title in their first Newport Bermuda race.

Competing on board Lea de Haas? 49-foot the WAVE team earned the inaugural Carleton Mitchell Finisterre Trophy as the yacht with the best-corrected time in the Cruiser Division.

The crew was made up of top Caribbean female offshore sailors including organiser Val Doan, Ms de Haas, Annie Westcott, Julie Swartz, Kate Lee, Bronwyn Adamson, Sierra Lowell, Mary Stoof and Becky Paull-Rowlette.

The owner, Ms de Haas, of St. Maarten, and navigator Ms Doan, spoke to about their cause and the race.

?Our mission is to raise awareness against violence everywhere and to raise funds so that we can donate money for the shelters in the British Virgin Islands and St. Maarten,? said Ms Doan.

?We thought what better form to do it then in a race of this magnitude. There is so much money spent on our toys and wouldn?t it be nice to it put back into the community rather than just on having fun. That was our whole concept and our premise.?

It was a year ago that they began planning for the Newport to Bermuda race as Team WAVE.

?Lea was all for it and she agreed to allow us to use her boat and she jumped in with both feet. She went to great lengths to get the boat ready.?

The crew they put together for Team WAVE had hundreds of thousands of miles of offshore experience under their belts.

?For instance I deliver boats for a living and I have done this 50 times,? said Ms Doan.

?Crossing the Gulf Stream is the most strategic part of the race.

?Lea has single-handed across the Atlantic and she sailed her own boat across the Atlantic in ?92 and that was when she first arrived in the Caribbean. She has also sailed single-handed all across the Caribbean and brought up to the States a couple of times.? was built in 1974 for the Admiral?s Cup and it is a Frers 49.

?We love German Frers, he designed a beautiful boat ? it?s a beautiful ocean racer,? added Ms Doan. ?It fell into disrepair and it was found by a friend on a dock in St. Maarten in ?93 or ?94. He brought it back to the BVI and it was a total wreck. He then sold it to Lea who did the complete refit. It is a gorgeous boat.

?It?s not great on the weekend racing kind of stuff, but she loves offshore she really showed her stuff. She loves the fact that we had no wind or very little wind, it doesn?t seem to bother her ? she gets into her groove and she just has beautiful balance.

?As navigator, I had to try and get her to a certain spot and we got the currents that we wanted to help move us forward.?

Ms Doan added although they won in the Cruising Division, the race was mentally tough.

?You had to be so focused on keeping the boat in the groove because we had between three knots to five knots of wind and sometimes eight or nine knots if we were really lucky especially for a big heavy boat.

?It is not the go fast racing machine ? it is usually more of a cruising type of boat and they are usually older and heavier. So the light air is very tough for us, so you really have to stay in the groove all the time. You have to get your tactics right otherwise you will still be out there and some are.?

While some racing yachts allow only the sparest of quarters, s crew was better provided for.

?We ate well, we didn?t have freeze-dried food that the boats with the big budgets have,? said Ms Doan.

?And we had comfortable living accommodation. It is Lea?s home. She invited us into her home for a week and it wasn?t quite a week-long girl party.?

But aside from racing their aim is to help women build confidence in any way that they can.

?We are all about getting women out there to learn to sail. We say it?s like getting your boyfriend or father to teach you to drive a car, who wants to do that? He?s just going to shout at you. So we take women out and we teach them because it gives them confidence and it is all about empowerment.

?In the past when a woman didn?t have experience she?d get relegated to sit on the rail, but with us they come on board, they learn their job and they feel good. A lot of them have gone on to run their own boats, to teach and to go on a run sailing companies. It is all about saying, ?you can do it?, and they go and do it.

?And so it is the same with the violence ? it is all about ?you don?t have to take it anymore? and having the courage to know that they can stand on their own two feet, because it is all about fear. My greatest fear about this race was not losing the race, but not getting to the start line because there are so many roadblocks put in your way.

?This is the same for women in a violent or an abusive situations. It is a fear of stepping out on their own especially if they have children to feed. It is a huge scary world out there and to think that they are feeling secure for some convoluted reason.

?Once they are on their own they think, ?what was I thinking about?? And a lot of us have seen our mothers go through that in the Seventies.?